Hi! Welcome to “Dusty Phrases.” You will find below an ancient phrase in one language or another, along with its English translation. You may also find the power to inspire your friends or provoke dread among your enemies.
This phrase refers to the occasional ancient practice of collectively pretending someone (often a political leader) never existed. From wiki:
Damnatio memoriae (Latin pronunciation: [damˈnaː.ti.oː meˈmo.ri.ae̯]) is a modern Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory”, indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Depending on the extent, it can be a case of historical negationism. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing. The practice has been seen as early as the EgyptianNew Kingdom period, where the Pharaohs Hatshepsut and Akhenaten were subject to it.
Although the term damnatio memoriae is Latin, the phrase was not used by the ancient Romans, and first appeared in a thesis written in Germany in 1689.
Ancient world
Damnatio memoriae of Commodus on an inscription in the Museum of Roman History Osterburken. The abbreviation “CO” was later restored with paint.
Today’s best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them.
Ancient Mesopotamia
According to Stefan Zawadzki, the oldest known examples of such practices come from around 2000–3000 BC. He cites the example of Lagash (an ancient city-state founded by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia), where preserved inscriptions concerning a conflict with another city-state, Umma, do not mention the ruler of Umma, but describe him as “the man of Umma”, which Zawadzki sees as an example of deliberate degradation of the ruler of Umma to the role of an unworthy person whose name and position in history the rulers of Lagash did not want to record for posterity.
Ancient Egypt
Coffin believed to belong to Akhenaten found in Tomb KV55. Note the typical obliteration of the face.
Egyptians also practiced this, as seen in relics from pharaoh Akhenaten‘s tomb and elsewhere. Akhenaten’s sole worship of the god Aten, instead of the traditional pantheon, was considered heretical. During his reign, Akhenaten endeavoured to have all references to the god Amun chipped away and removed. After his reign, temples to Aten were dismantled and the stones reused to create other temples. Images of Akhenaten had their faces chipped away, and images and references to Amun reappeared. The people blamed their misfortunes on Akhenaten’s shift of worship to Atenism, away from the gods they served before him. Other Egyptian victims of this practice include the pharaohs that immediately succeeded Akhenaten, including Smenkhkare, Neferneferuaten, and Ay. The campaign of damnatio memoriae against Akhenaten and his successors was initiated by the latter’s successor, Horemheb, who decided to erase from history all pharaohs associated with the unpopular Amarna Period; this process was continued by Horemheb’s successors.
Ancient Hittites
The erased rock relief at Sirkeli Höyük that is believed to be of Mursili III.
One case of damnatio memoriae is known for the ancient Hittite empire. Mursili III was a king of the Hittites for about seven years in 1282–1275 BC. But then he was overthrown by his uncle Hattusili III, who then assumed the throne.
Located near the village of Sirkeli Höyük in Turkey, there’s a well known relief of Mursili’s father Muwatalli II, as well as a second, very similar relief that is believed to be that of his son Mursili. But then it was largely destroyed in antiquity, most likely by his spiteful uncle. The relief of the father was left untouched.
Ancient Greece
Part of an honorific decree for Phaedrus of Sphettus, passed in 259/8 BC. The lines mentioning Phaedrus’ interactions with the Antigonids were chiselled out as part of the damnatio memoriae of 200 BC.
The practice was known in Ancient Greece. The Athenians frequently destroyed inscriptions which referred to individuals or events that they no longer wished to commemorate. After Timotheus was convicted of treason and removed from his post as general in 373 BC, all references to him as a general were deleted from the previous year’s naval catalogue. The most complete example is their systematic removal of all references to the Antigonids from inscriptions in their city, in 200 BC when they were besieged by the Antigonid king Philip V of Macedon during the Second Macedonian War. One decree praising Demetrius Poliorcetes (Philip V’s great-grandfather) was smashed and thrown down a well.
At Delphi, an honorific inscription erected between 337 and 327 BC for Aristotle and his nephew Callisthenes, two philosophers who were closely associated with the Macedonians, were smashed and thrown in a well after the death of Alexander of Macedon in 323 BC.
Lucius Aelius Sejanus suffered damnatio memoriae following a failed conspiracy to overthrow emperor Tiberius in AD 31. His statues were destroyed and his name obliterated from all public records. The above coin from Augusta Bilbilis, originally struck to mark the consulship of Sejanus, has the words L. Aelio Seiano obliterated.
In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an emperor, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked (normally defaced). Because there was an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official damnatio memoriae actually took place, although it seems to have been quite rare.
Compounding this difficulty is the fact that a completely successful damnatio memoriae results—by definition—in the full and total erasure of the subject from the historical record. In the case of figures such as emperors or consuls it is unlikely that complete success was possible, as even comprehensive obliteration of the person’s existence and actions in records and the like would continue to be historically visible without extensive reworking. The impracticality of such a cover-up could be vast—in the case of Emperor Geta, for example, coins bearing his effigy proved difficult to entirely remove from circulation for several years, even though the mere mention of his name was punishable by death.
Difficulties in implementation also arose if there was not full and enduring agreement with the punishment, such as when the Senate’s condemnation of Nero was implemented—leading to attacks on many of his statues—but subsequently evaded with the enormous funeral he was given by Vitellius. Similarly, it was often difficult to prevent later historians from “resurrecting” the memory of the sanctioned person.
The impossibility of actually erasing memory of an emperor have led scholars to conclude that this was not actually the goal of damnatio. Instead, they understand damnatio:
not so much as an attempt to obliterate memory entirely as to transform honorific commemoration into a form of visible denigration. That is: the power of an act of damnatio relies, at least in part, on the viewer of a monument being able to supplement the gaps in an inscription with their own knowledge of what those gaps had once contained, and the reasons why the text had been removed
— Polly Low, “Remembering, Forgetting, and Rewriting the Past”
These emperors are known to have been erased from monuments:
The Doge of VeniceMarino Faliero‘s portrait was removed and painted over with a black shroud as damnatio memoriae for his attempted coup. The shroud bears the Latin phrase, “This is the space for Marino Faliero, beheaded for crimes.”
The practice of replacing pagan beliefs and motifs with Christian, and purposefully not recording the pagan history, has been compared to damnatio memoriae as well
There is not Indiana Jones 4 and 5. Thankfully, they stopped with the third one lol.
Loading...
Exactly! Doing more would have been a terrible idea.
Loading...
Yes, it would have messed up the franchise. I do that with some of Star Wars movies too lol.
Loading...
Yeah. Same. It’s weird because I know a lot of people really hated the Star Wars prequel movies, but they are gaining in favorability for a lot of people with the passage of time (assuming that they were made at all, of course.)
I wonder if the most recent trilogy will do the same. I don’t think I’ve seen a Star Wars movie since The Force Awakens, which I mostly liked.
Loading...
The Force Awakens wasn’t too bad but you didn’t miss anything by not watching the rest of them. I was not a fan of them at all. I’ve noticed that the prequels are more popular with specific generations. It’s interesting to see actually since they were originally pretty much hated.
Loading...
Yeah, agreed, and that’s good to know about the recent movies.
I think it makes a difference if you grew up with them, verses if you watched them for the first time as an adult. People are usually more forgiving of a thing they loved as a child. I never thought they prequels were *that* bad and I liked “Revenge of the Sith” quite a bit. The biggest issue with the prequels, IMO, was that somebody needed to audience test Jar Jar before the movies were released.
Loading...
Lol, fully agree with you about Jar Jar. I watched Star Wars as a teenager (almost 18 though) and I didn’t like the prequels much. However, maybe like you said had I watched Star Wars as a kid I may have liked them more simply because I would be more willing to forgive their flaws.
_2012-09-30_008.jpg)
.jpg)
_part_2.jpg)
_-_Museo_Archeologico,_Cagliari_-_Photo_by_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto,_November_11_2016.jpg)
That’s such an interesting phrase, I do that sometimes when I watch a crappy movie lol.
Lol. Me too. As far as I’m concerned, the 4th and 5th Indiana Jones movies were never made.
There is not Indiana Jones 4 and 5. Thankfully, they stopped with the third one lol.
Exactly! Doing more would have been a terrible idea.
Yes, it would have messed up the franchise. I do that with some of Star Wars movies too lol.
Yeah. Same. It’s weird because I know a lot of people really hated the Star Wars prequel movies, but they are gaining in favorability for a lot of people with the passage of time (assuming that they were made at all, of course.)
I wonder if the most recent trilogy will do the same. I don’t think I’ve seen a Star Wars movie since The Force Awakens, which I mostly liked.
The Force Awakens wasn’t too bad but you didn’t miss anything by not watching the rest of them. I was not a fan of them at all. I’ve noticed that the prequels are more popular with specific generations. It’s interesting to see actually since they were originally pretty much hated.
Yeah, agreed, and that’s good to know about the recent movies.
I think it makes a difference if you grew up with them, verses if you watched them for the first time as an adult. People are usually more forgiving of a thing they loved as a child. I never thought they prequels were *that* bad and I liked “Revenge of the Sith” quite a bit. The biggest issue with the prequels, IMO, was that somebody needed to audience test Jar Jar before the movies were released.
Lol, fully agree with you about Jar Jar. I watched Star Wars as a teenager (almost 18 though) and I didn’t like the prequels much. However, maybe like you said had I watched Star Wars as a kid I may have liked them more simply because I would be more willing to forgive their flaws.